Nina Meledandri: The Metaphysics of Twilight
Mark Daniel Cohen
It is not quite as dark here as we thought. On the contrary, the interior is
pulsating with light. It is, of course, the internal light of roots, a wandering
phosphorescence, tiny veins of light marbling the darkness, an evanescent shimmer
of nightmarish substances. — Bruno Schulz, “Spring”
There is a hidden
life of objects. There is an animation of the dusk, a half existence that blooms
and burgeons under the cast spell of half light. In the tentative fall of that
tepid fluorescence, in the ambivalence of subtle and undetermined shadows, unknown
forms of life congeal. Things come into their domain — books conference
and debate their deleterious diatribes, photos speak their memories in secret
societies, attics become carnivals of vague promises and threats, basements turn
into cauldrons of theatrical spectacle, and in the heart of the mind, smooth
and sliding presentiments, dim instigations of sparkling shudders, awaken to
the dawn of darknesses and take the realm of the inner world.
And as in all other
ways, what is true of the mind is true of art. There is a life of the brush,
a life of the chisel and the modeling tool, of the charcoal stick, the pencil,
and pastel — there is a life of its own to the mark and the stroke, to the
paint and the clay, to the smudge and the smear, which commit their events by
an inner urge, by an eventuality that roots in the center of some alien soul.
And yet, the life of the movements and implements of art are not merely their
own. They refer in their actions, in their postures and leanings, in their hesitations
and their assurances, to some other evocation, to a realm of interests and forebodings
more hidden still — to the most hidden realm of all, the realm towards which
the artist portends. The marks of the artist speak of some other place.
Or so it is when
the artist is truly an artist, and so it is the case with the art of Nina Meledandri.
The 46 oil, encaustic, and watercolor paintings in her exhibition demonstrate
a spontaneity in the making of forms, in the striking of colors, and in the arrangement
of parts that is clearly driven by some impulse other than conscious decision
and technical judgments of composition. Each of the works is devised as a series
of abstract forms — largely abstract, with some resembling the vaguely organic,
some looking like pods and eggs and tendrils, others like indeterminate floral
parts. These elements are arranged most often in rough grids — set in rows
and columns, loosely indicated — and are toned generally in muted hues,
set with the sensory thickness that comes of encaustic, as if everything in the
painting were dense with its own reality, heavy with some kind of life. Taken
together, the elements in any one work seem a kind of sketching — an impulsive
jotting down, or welling up, of forms that obey their own laws, of shapes with
a unique genotypic coding, each a species all its own, each one sui generis.
This kind of thing
either works or it doesn’t, and there is no law of art making by which you
can know whether it will or not — no law other than the law of the eye,
the law of the inner senses. You must feel if such compositions are anything
more than deliberate design — deliberate, whether thought through or not.
With Meledandri, it works. The artificial arrangements, with the abstract and
nearly organic elements set in rows, set as if flat on a table or in the cells
of a display case, convey the sense of the elements being in conversation. It
feels as if each knows the others are there, and that they are coordinating in
some silent whisper of communication and benign conspiracy, some transmission
of ambiguous purpose and impossibly subtle intent. These works are night visions,
whether dark or, as is most often the case, bathed in a pale light. They are
palpebral hallucinations, occupants of dreams, projected and cast on the veil
of the inner eye, on the lids that close the vision of the essential evening.
And the titles of many of the works make the point: Almost Woke, Plumbing the
Depths, Dark Dream, Inner Core, As If I Were Awake, and Twilight.
The elements of
each painting seem to respond to each other in a secret code we do not know and
can barely acknowledge, and the question is raised and remains — how are
we to respond to them? The answer is not in the senses of knowledge, but in the
deeper sense of inference, in the places at the heart of us, places from which
come philosophies, and theories, and mathematics, and dreams — and art.
We are to respond not with our eyes but with our nerves endings, feel these forms
with networks of intimate sensation that mesh our lives and our selves together,
with the lines of febrile delicacy that can vibrate along with the thin tendrils
that hang in so many of Meledandri’s paintings, a delicacy that can hum
with their secret song. We must feel our way into art such as this, and trust
that the hidden life captured in Meledandri’s works, the life that blossoms
in the magic spell it breathes like a vapor, infects us with the dream of our
own inner lives. It is the very thing art is meant to do.
Nina Meledandri:
The Color Within
David Findlay Galleries
New York City — uptown Sources:
Web Sites:
David Findlay Galleries web site
davidfindlaygalleries.com
Nina Meledandri’s web site
www.meledandri.com
Books:
Bruno Schulz, “Spring,” Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass,
translated by Celina Wieniewska with an introduction by John Updike (New York:
Penguin Books, 1987)
